Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Today

Curtis Yarvin

The sick genius of Nathan Fielder

You Can See Everything is a brilliant and deeply evil film about the utterly cursed world we live in. It is the only world we have, so it’s worth getting good at living in. I am going to be free with the spoilers. There is nothing to spoil. There is actually no true content in this three-hour film. Well, about 90 seconds. You can see it twice and you probably should. The concept, editing, cinematography and performances are absolutely superb. It should teach you that, in an evil world of lies, only the truth can save you – and not always. The starting point of You Can See Everything is charisma. Nathan Fielder, the director, and Elizabeth Holmes, the subject, both have it, to Jedi mind power-level. They can look into your eyes and make you believe. Hitler had this too.

Wednesday

Sam Kriss

The Social Reckoning is deeply boring

Has anyone in human history inspired more visceral disgust than Mark Zuckerberg? Hard to imagine. I know I used to get a shudder down my spine every time I saw him on TV, being upbraided by some kind of congressional subcommittee. Look at this uncanny demon, white as death, covered in a thin liquid sheen, with his big watery eyes like an uncomprehending animal, his blank inhuman face, his halting and inarticulate speech, and his sinister, gangly form, which didn’t seem to stand up on its own feet so much as it drooped down from the neck, as if he were being hung up on invisible hooks. This is not a human being but an ungainly meat puppet, a shell for some slithering being. Which made sense, really.

Monday

James Walton

War is as good as Succession

In his ruefully funny 2012 novel The Man Who Forgot His Wife, John O’Farrell compares the increasingly uncivilized process of divorce to war: “In 1939 the RAF (Royal Air Force) thought it was immoral to bomb the Black Forest to deprive the Germans of timber. But by 1945 they were deliberately creating firestorms to kill as many civilians as possible.” As the title suggests, the starry new divorce-based drama War makes a similar comparison – except that here the unhappy couple are cutting straight to Dresden. The show began as it meant to go on: which is to say, glitteringly. At a London awards ceremony of ineffable poshness, Morgan Henderson (Dominic West) was named Pioneer of the Year for creating one of the world’s biggest yet nicest social media platforms.

Friday

Stuart Jeffries

‘I think the best revenge is indifference’: Salman Rushdie interviewed

“I probably got one or two seconds look at him before he delivered the first blow,” recalls Sir Salman Rushdie. For the next 27 seconds, on August 12, 2022, the man whom Rushdie will refer to only as A. (“for asinine,” he explains) tried to kill the writer on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. A. slashed through the tendons of Rushdie’s right hand, cut his thigh, stomach and chest, incised a gaping wound in his neck and finally stabbed him in the right eye.

Damian Thompson

The genius of Sherlock & Co.

The podcast audio-drama Sherlock & Co. is an updated version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories in which the great detective is neurodivergent and gay, Dr. Watson is a millennial who preaches against ethnic stereotyping, Lestrade is a woman who speaks with a Caribbean twang, and the society gossip Langdale Pike has morphed into a drag queen. Throw in the fact that it’s produced by Gary Lineker’s Goalhanger and you might imagine that we’re talking about a woke brew designed to repel conservative Holmesians like me. Actually, Sherlock & Co. is my favorite podcast ever. I love it almost as much as Conan Doyle’s ur-text and infinitely more than the BBC’s Sherlock, which began well but then disappeared up its smug backside.

Thursday

Richard Bratby

When will I see a Carmen set in 19th-century Seville?

No critic sets out to be a reactionary, even though it’s much easier that way. There’s no real satisfaction in rejecting novelty on sight; no joy in measuring a living performance against your record collection and coming down, every time, in favor of the dead Nazi. I get that. Still, it’s a plain fact that in three decades of regular opera-going, I have never – not once – seen a live production of Carmen that locates the action in 19th-century Seville. Or one that centers the visual elements – mantillas, sunshine, picture-postcard Spanishness – that directors tell us (and how they tell us!) have become such clichés.

carmen

Friday

Graeme Thomson

Billy Strings’s extraordinary and exhilarating new album

It’s easy to get the wrong idea about bluegrass – to imagine that this flinty shard of American traditional music is baked centuries deep into the soil of Appalachia. In fact it developed in the 1940s, pioneered by Kentucky maestro Bill Monroe, and only truly flourished during the American folk revival of the 1960s. Bluegrass was one of the few places where the hippies and good ol’ boys found communion; the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia was a devotee. The style has evolved, generation upon generation, via exponents such as Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and Del McCoury. The latest bluegrass star is William Lee Apostol, aka Billy Strings, a 33-year-old guitarist, singer and songwriter from Michigan, whose backstory reads like some grisly American gothic melodrama.

Richard Bratby

Words are the most important part of any opera

The long days wane, summer fades and sure enough, the big international guest orchestras land at the BBC Proms. A rare catch this year was the Proms debut of the orchestra of the New York Metropolitan Opera, under its music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Debut? No, I couldn’t quite believe it either. What with the regular Radio 3 broadcasts from the Met, and all those live cinema relays, the Met Orchestra almost feels like part of the family. There must be few overseas orchestras whose live performances are more familiar to British audiences. No question, though, there’s always something rather festive about hearing a great opera orchestra in concert.

James Delingpole

The Grand Tour is the perfect TV to pass out to

The Grand Tour – aka Amazon does Top Gear – is back with a new trio of presenters. Whether you care will largely depend on your general attitude to television. If you think its purpose is to push boundaries, entertain, inform and edify, you may as well stop reading now. If, on the other hand, you treat TV like soma, then the lightly revamped show is probably worth your consideration. I’m in the soma category. The only job of TV, as far as I’m concerned, is to relieve me of having to make conversation with the Fawn while I’m having my supper, and then to distract me long enough for me to be able to half-digest my food so that I’m ready to have my bath and go to bed.

Alex Burghart

The wonder of the Bayeux Tapestry

How the Froggies must be laughing. Such a gracious loan. So kind. Like England lending Henry V’s longbows to the Louvre – or sailing HMS Victory up the Seine. Well, let them titter. The Tapestry is home. Nothing else matters. Likely sewed in Canterbury in the 1070s, before being sent across the Channel, it has only ever left Bayeux twice before. In 1803, when Boney was contemplating a pop at the White Cliffs, he displayed it in Paris. (After Trafalgar, it was quietly returned to Normandy.) Then, as the Nazis were retreating from Operation Overlord, it was taken for safe-keeping to the cellars of the Louvre and, in late 1944, only weeks after Paris’s liberation, placed on public view. Today’s minibreak from Bayeux comes in rather happier times.

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Will Anna Wintour survive the Galliano debacle?

In this summer’s couture blockbuster The Devil Wears Prada 2, the moment of greatest humiliation for Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley comes about halfway through the film. With her Vogue-adjacent fashion magazine Runway imperiled by budget cuts and its philistine new owner, Miranda is not spared the hair-shirt treatment the rest of her staff endure. In a scene that is supposed to be funny but ends up being almost tragic, this ice-hearted doyenne of the fashion world is compelled to travel from New York to Milan Fashion Week in coach class, among hoi polloi. As the usually excellent Streep is forced to mug and gurn at the humiliation that she endures, I found myself mouthing “The horror! The horror!” – but for altogether different reasons.

Friday

Philip Clark

How Miles Davis and John Coltrane changed jazz forever

Why does the jazz world still feel so bedazzled by trumpeter Miles Davis and saxophonist John Coltrane? This year marks the centenary of their births, and even those who consider jazz marginal to their interests are likely to know Davis classics such as Sketches of Spain and Kind Of Blue, while Coltrane has almost become deified: there’s even a fully functioning Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco. The jazz industry, meanwhile, is gorging on their centenaries with recordings, new and reissued, and books, new and repackaged.

Thursday

Sam Leith

An agreeable new 2D fighter

Grade: B The final boss of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, called the Champion (they could have tried harder), is up front about his philosophy. “Actions are worth more than any word,” he says. “And the greatest action is... to fight!” Well, that’s Proust told, the big biscuit-dunking jessie. Here’s a very competently made, agreeably hectic new entry in the lineage of that most apparently basic of computer games, the 2D fighter. Ever since the heady days of Yie Ar Kung-Fu, gamers have known there’s fun to be had in having a couple of cartoon characters square off and slap each other upside the face. This one is an anime-style battler featuring an initial roster of 20 well-beloved Marvel superheroes (Wolverine, Deadpool, Captain America, etc.

James Delingpole

The terror of Russian prisons

The competition must be pretty stiff for “World’s worst airport to be caught with drugs in your baggage”: Bogota? Miami? Singapore? Ciudad de la Paz? Gatwick? But Moscow would surely have to be a strong contender. I’ve been detained there myself, only for an hour. But you’re never told why you’re being kept waiting, how much longer it will be, or whether this is routine or serious. The young men and women in those oversized peaked hats are perfectly civil but apart from the impenetrable language barrier you’re dealing with several centuries’ worth of culturally-inbred opacity and bureaucracy. And the prisons don’t bear thinking about.

Richard Bratby

A true visual spectacle: Edinburgh’s The Galloping Cure reviewed

Those lights! Thinking back on The Galloping Cure, Missy Mazzoli’s new opera for the Edinburgh International Festival, that’s what lingers: cascades of lights, shimmering and flickering in every hue that modern LED technology can supply. At first the effect is almost Zen – soothing washes of pinks and blues and ochers, with carousel horses rising and weaving among them. Then, as the action intensifies and the characters succumb to collective mania, they’re brighter, faster, more aggressive: a frantic sensory overload, flashing to the rave-derived backbeat of Mazzoli’s score. Lucy Carter’s lighting designs are meant to transfix you, and they really do. Hardly the point of an opera, you might say.

Hermione Eyre

A perfect little exhibition on the Isles of Scilly

I was in the most southwesterly pub in Britain, the Turk’s Head, on the Scilly island of St. Agnes (population: 75) when I noticed a poster advertising a local exhibition of the work of “renowned artist and birdwatcher Hilda Quick, 1895-1978.” I had stumbled upon an artist with a wonderfully sharp line and an even sharper eye I had never heard of her, but her work on the poster, “The Pursuit of Art,” was compelling. A stylish wood engraving from the 1920s, it showed female art students drawing a male life model. This was the new equality Hilda Quick would have discovered when she left her native Penzance to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1919.

Robin Simon

Renoir was a master – let no one tell you otherwise

It was summer 1874 at Claude Monet’s house in Argenteuil on the Seine just outside Paris. Édouard Manet arrived from his house at Gennevilliers, on the opposite bank, and began painting Monet’s wife and young son in the garden. Auguste Renoir turned up and started to paint the same scene alongside Manet. The little masterpiece he created is in the forthcoming exhibition Renoir and Love at the National Gallery. In 1924, Monet recalled that day half a century earlier: Manet, seduced by the color and the light, decided to paint a picture en plein air of people under the trees… Renoir arrived… He asked me for my palette, a brush and a canvas, and there he was, painting away beside Manet.

Friday

Richard Bratby

A much-deserved revival of John McCabe, a formidable British composer

Grade: B+ “Cheltenham Symphonies”, they used to call them – a catch-all term for the kind of large-scale, traditionally inclined postwar works that found a natural home at the Cheltenham Music Festival. But it was also a sneer: a dig at the supposedly parochial nature of British music in the 1960s and 1970s. Over in Europe, the avant-garde was doing whizzy things with Marxism and electronics. British music, went the narrative, was suburban, outdated and drab. Now listen to John McCabe’s Third Symphony of 1978. McCabe’s orchestration is as gorgeous as a bird of paradise; it shimmers like the colors on the surface of a bubble. Not that there’s anything fragile about McCabe’s musical engineering.

mccabe
Christopher Sandford

How the Ramones redefined punk rock

Is popular music truly an art form? This question has never met a straightforward answer, either from the musicians themselves or the public, and it hangs over the exhibitions currently commemorating the 50th anniversary of punk rock. Among others, there’s the Outsiders, Outcasts, Rebels + Weirdos show on at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles, while the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland is hosting its own celebration under the name Hey! Ho! Let’s Go! Punk at 50. Somehow I’m put in mind of the quote attributed to Jean Cocteau about “Ameri-cans being a funny people – first you shock them, then they put you in a museum.

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Apple Music has redeemed itself

Just two weeks ago I was ready to cancel my subscription to Apple Music. I’d stumbled across its “Composer Essentials” – a list of 100 composers so significant that they merit their own curated playlists. It includes Bonds, Boyle, Caccini, Dawson, Dett, Perry, Poldowski, Sohy, Strohl and Walker. If those names don’t ring a bell, how about the composers who are missing? Albéniz, C.P.E. Bach, Bellini, Berg, Bizet, Borodin, Chabrier, Kodály, Martinu, Messiaen, Mussorgsky, Nielsen, Poulenc, Schoenberg, Walton, Weber and Webern. See what I mean? The “Essentials” list is stuffed with DEI hires. Which – an analogy to Cambridge University comes to mind – does no favors to the black and female composers who deservedly feature in it, such as Joplin and Beach.

wagner apple music